The difference between dumb and mean

From our overstocked archives

Sam Smith, 2014 - One thing that I have known hardly anything about are those who use trans to describe their gender or sexuality.  In fact, if I know anyone in these categories I don’t know it.

Thus, I was interested when I stumbled upon Piers Morgan interviewing 29 year old transgender advocate Janet Mock who has recently written a memoir, Redefining Realness.  

It seemed to me an informative interview. Others, however, did not see it that way. The Twitter and other responses were so strongly antagonistic towards Morgan that he had Mock back to explain what the problem was.

What fascinated me about some of these responses  was that they seemed a metaphor for what is wrong with our political and cultural discussion these days. It is as though both conservatives and liberals view their viewpoints as fundamentalist theology and if you don’t see things their way, you’re going to hell. And it’s not just about philosophy, it is about using the right language and not making descriptive errors that are considered offensive.  

Mock was, in fact, quite reasonable compared to some of her enthusiasts. At one point there was this exchange:

Morgan: Why have I been vilified for being transparently supportive of you? I don’t get it!

Janet Mock: Being offensive and being kind are not mutually exclusive things. We can be good people but be ignorant. It’s about understanding.

But for others there were the purportedly outrageous mistakes that Morgan had made. For example, Robin Abcarian wrote in the LA Times: “Many in the trans community took issue with Morgan’s description of Mock as ‘a boy until she turned 18’ and his focus on how she revealed her gender identity to her boyfriend.”

Of course, if you belong to a subculture representing roughly 3% of the overall population it is not likely that the other 97% will be as well informed as you would like them to be. This doesn’t mean they’re mean, just ignorant.  The best approach in this situation is not scold or berate but to explain. I’ve frequently been in political positions supported by not much more than 3%,  so I have some sense of the problem.

Further, as a reporter, I know that asking dumb questions can be a good way of getting better explanations from people. And how an interviewee felt about something such as their gender back when they were a teenager is not irrelevant. It helps to tell the story.

But today’s liberal culture seems to have developed an almost gated approach to acceptable attitudes, values, details and even questions that can quickly put the untrained and uninformed in harm’s way.

I grew up as one of six children so I learned early that this doesn’t work too well. And along the way some things reinforced this view. I remember, for example, flying to my son’s New England university next to a man from North Carolina whose son was on the same campus. I asked him how his son was liking Brown and he responded with something like, “Well he’s never had to deal with those liberal types before. but he’s learning.”

I had never thought about the difference between someone like that man’s son and mine. The southern teen had not chosen his upbringing  but apparently now had chosen another course, suggesting that he was looking in new places. How much harder that could be, I thought, than what my own son faced.

I also think about Martin Luther King’s advice to his staff that they should remember that, if successful, the people they were fighting today would some day be their friends.

And I am reminded of my Puerto Rican nephew who, as an ESPN sportscaster some years back, had to do play by play broadcasts heard in all Latin American countries. One of the problems: carefully avoiding slang that might be acceptable in one  country but not in another.

Diversity is not as simple as it may seem. For example, using the right language is probably not at the top of the list of things that will subdue the brutality now experienced by many of in the trans community. The wrong language of the mean is not the cause of their problems, but a reflection of it. Treat people nice and your language will follow.

And it is strange that those who talk so much about diversity can close the door so quickly on one of the consequences of that diversity: namely, the more diverse our relationships are, the harder it is to know enough about others, the feelings and language they prefer, and what annoys them. Given all the humans raised throughout history in a monoculture, is it really odd that some the stories of a multicultural America are not known by everyone?

And it is an America where things can change pretty fast.  As I was writing this piece,  Facebook came out with a list of over 50 gender and sexual terms folks can use on its pages to describe themselves, such as agender,  androgyne/androgynous,  bigender,  cis,  gender fluid, gender nonconforming, gender questioning, gender variant, genderqueer, intersex, male to female/mtf, neither,  rneutrois, non-binary, pangender, transgender, trans man, trans woman, trans female, trans male,  trans person, and two-spirit.

Meanwhile, some words we don’t understand well at all. We have already paid quite a price by not making an adequate distinction between the ignorant and the mean. Groups that were once more pro-liberal have drifted to the right.  And while we always have had fundamentalist Christians in America, but there was a time when we called many of them New Deal Democrats.

To live successfully in a diverse culture we have to learn how to inform, convince, and convert rather than scold and condemn. And we  have to value reciprocal liberty.  Remember that liberals, for example, only comprise a bloc about seven times the size of the trans population.

So when Pierce Morgan doesn’t say the right thing, help him, don’t ball him out.